Executive Dashboard Facilitates Insight for UNICCO Service Company

BACKGROUND: UNICCO Service Company is one of North America's largest facilities outsourcing companies with more than $700 million in annual sales, 1,000 customers and 19,000 employees. UNICCO Service Company offers the industry's most comprehensive suite of facilities services, from maintenance, engineering and janitorial to production support, lighting and administrative/office services.

PLATFORMS: IBM WebSphere Portal.

PROBLEM SOLVED: We use a balanced scorecard methodology to ensure organizational alignment on strategic objectives and to regularly review key business metrics. This business metric review process was largely conducted manually, was very time-intensive, was prone to data errors and inflexible - meaning it was difficult to tailor the data across different management levels and geographies. We turned to Bowstreet to provide an automated balanced scorecard solution based on the Bowstreet's Executive Dashboard Solution framework. Our goals were to: give executives real-time 24x7 access to the balanced scorecard information via a standard Internet browser; reduce data errors and improve data quality, consistency and security; provide online collaboration capabilities; deliver tailored information across multiple management levels; include a summary capability to provide all employees visibility into quarterly operational results; ensure connectivity to both data warehouses and operational data sources; and enable the quick deployment of new operational metrics. Bowstreet would give us a robust solution framework with enterprise-class security and industry-leading collaboration capabilities. It would also give us a Web-based composite view of multiple business metrics via tabular portal pages and individual portlets connected to multiple disparate data sources. Finally, because Bowstreet's dashboard solutions leverage the company's Portlet Factory technology, the balanced scorecard portlets can be easily tailored across multiple management levels.

PRODUCT FUNCTIONALITY: Bowstreet's Sales and Executive Dashboard is able to aggregate data from a number of sources and compile it into a single sophisticated user interface. The solution enables us to choose specific features for each dashboard we build: data filters, alerting, interactive charting and graphing and drill downs. Additionally, the software includes many vital dashboard utilities, such as the ability to export portlet data to Microsoft Excel, print portlet data and e-mail a link to a portlet.

STRENGTHS: One of the software's biggest strengths lies in its basic value proposition: The ability to easily provide each user with a customized real-time composite view of multiple KPIs. The Portlet Factory also allows UNICCO to easily customize and extend the solution to ensure the quick deployment of new operational metrics.

WEAKNESSES: The product's level of solution customizability requires extra effort by IT to define what data can be viewed, updated and reconfigured by different user types.

SELECTION CRITERIA: Our primary selection criterion was the ability to develop individualized and intuitive dashboards. Our second criterion was in regard to a flexible solution architecture and integrated development environment. Bowstreet met these requirements by encapsulating our dashboard design patterns in reusable automaton components, and Bowstreet's data services layer and Integration Extensions enable our IT department to easily incorporate new dashboard KPIs and new data sources. Third, we needed a vendor that would match our level of quality. Lastly, UNICCO Service Company has made a commitment to and investment in WebSphere Portal. We wanted all our dashboards to leverage this investment and sit on top of WebSphere Portal.

DELIVERABLES: Most importantly for us, we've been able to further the self-service environment. Users can easily update data, analyze the KPIs relevant to them, see charts and gauges of specific information and print their own reports. This approach delivers more information more quickly than other solutions and does not add additional demands to the IT department.

VENDOR SUPPORT: They have a very knowledgeable professional services organization that works closely with our staff to ensure success during every step of the project. Additionally, their customer support organization is always responsive.

DOCUMENTATION: The documentation is very easy to follow and is organized logically.